Microsoft has made clear its intention to retire its famous email client,
Outlook. Hallelujah! I’ve long said that continuing to assist people with
this bloated, outdated software was the main thing turning my hair grey.
Of course, this is the same bloated, outdated software adored by countless
loyal fans who swear they could never cope with anything else. They shun the
more streamlined web version of Outlook, which grew out of Hotmail, and
refuse to believe that thousands of organisations and millions of
individuals actually use Gmail for real work. Outlook really is the marmite
of the software world!
But for better or worse, the choice is no longer in their hands. The
Outlook we all loved or hated has been renamed
Classic Outlook on Windows and
Legacy Outlook on Mac, and
no longer ships with new PCs, with a view to its eventual withdrawal as
part of Microsoft’s roadmap to replace it.
What’s next?
If you use Windows, you might notice an app called Outlook (new) has been
installed automatically. In time, it will be simply called Outlook.
The new Outlook has clearly been built from scratch, inheriting little from
its predecessor. In fact, it looks and feels very much like the lightweight
web-based Outlook (formerly Hotmail) mentioned earlier.
If your email account is with Microsoft – in other words, your email
address ends in outlook.com, live.com, hotmail.com or hotmail.co.uk; or you
use Microsoft 365 email as part of an organisation – the new Outlook should
function well for you.
But for everyone else, there’s a notable devil in the detail that’s easily
overlooked: Outlook is no longer an IMAP client. That is, it doesn’t
directly connect to third-party email providers like AOL, BT, Google,
TalkTalk and Yahoo.
Instead, when you add one of these accounts to Outlook, you’re actually
giving Microsoft permission to maintain a connection to your email provider
within its cloud infrastructure, and to cache a copy of your mail on its
servers. Outlook then provides a view, if you will, to those messages.
Changes you make in Outlook sync back via the Microsoft cloud to your
provider.
I foresee people being variously affected by this as follows:
- Some people, especially light users of email, won’t care or won’t
understand the significance of it. The new Outlook will probably work
acceptably for these people.
- Some people may find their email doesn’t properly sync with their
provider. At the time of writing, there is a considerable list of
known issues using Outlook with Gmail, for example.
- Some people won’t like the idea that Microsoft is storing a copy of all
their mail in its own cloud service.
- Some people will note that by duplicating all their email in the cloud,
Microsoft is increasing their carbon footprint.
Finally, it’s important to note that the new Outlook may not yet have
some of the features you expect. For example, support for PST files is
only just being rolled out as of spring 2025. If you’re a power user of the
traditional Outlook, you should check the
roadmap to see what Microsoft plans to make available and when.
What are the alternatives?
If you currently use Outlook but don’t wish to use the new version, broadly
speaking you have two choices:
- Use an alternative email client, like
Thunderbird. If you have a Mac,
try the built-in
Mail
app.
- Use webmail. This means accessing your email in a
browser – like Chrome, Edge,
Firefox or Safari – via the website of your email provider.